bad bug reports

As a programmer I am not only in charge of creating code high up on the scale of cool but also maintaining code. Creating new code, and the maintenance of old code invariably creates bugs, mis-features, and warts, be them intentional or not. As I work in a medium sized company, we have a small QA team that is in charge of making sure that such bugs are reported and fixed.

Using our bug tracking software we get bug reports and respond to them in a web based interface. Sometimes bug reports leave something to be desired.

Based on an excellent page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000029.html there are 3 (and only 3) things a bug report should have in it:

Steps to reproduce

What you expected to see

What you saw instead

Using these simple pieces of information a programmer can not only see exactly what went wrong, but can generally deduce where the problem is. Any of these three items is semi-useful on it's own, but all three combined togeather are almost assured to make your developers smile and get your bugssquashed faster.